War Plan Red

Invasion of Canada. Bombing raids on British industrial interests. Naval blockade. Chemical weapons. Six million troops fighting on the Eastern seaboard. This wasn't a crazy Nazi plan. It was the United States' strategy to destroy Britain as a world superpower.

How the US Planned to Destroy Britain Just a Few Years Before World War II.  It actually sounds like this was a lot more than just an elaborate contingency plan, since the US had already built three disguised airfields in Canada for War Plan Red.

There are guns, and then there are guns.

Gail Collins nails it:

Today, the amazing thing about the reaction to the Giffords shooting is that virtually all the discussion about how to prevent a recurrence has been focusing on improving the tone of our political discourse. That would certainly be great. But you do not hear much about the fact that Jared Loughner came to Giffords’s sweet gathering with a semiautomatic weapon that he was able to buy legally because the law restricting their sale expired in 2004 and Congress did not have the guts to face up to the National Rifle Association and extend it.

If Loughner had gone to the Safeway carrying a regular pistol, the kind most Americans think of when they think of the right to bear arms, Giffords would probably still have been shot and we would still be having that conversation about whether it was a sane idea to put her Congressional district in the cross hairs of a rifle on the Internet.

But we might not have lost a federal judge, a 76-year-old church volunteer, two elderly women, Giffords’s 30-year-old constituent services director and a 9-year-old girl who had recently been elected to the student council at her school and went to the event because she wanted to see how democracy worked.

"So?"

Dick Cheney thinks you are stupid, myopic, and self-centered. Don't bother to have an opinion on anything important, because he's not listening. That's the CIA's job.

"On the security front, I think there's a general consensus that we've made major progress, that the surge has worked. That's been a major success," Cheney told ABC News' Martha Raddatz during an exclusive interview in Oman.

When asked how that assessment comports with recent polls that show about two-thirds of Americans say the fight in Iraq is not worth it, Cheney replied, "So?"

"You don't care what the American people think?" Raddatz asked the vice president.

"You can't be blown off course by polls," said Cheney.

The day before yesterday, Cheney tried to backtrack by claiming that when he said "So?" he was confused because he didn't think Raddatz had asked him a question. Either way, he's still not listening.

Numbers

While our fearless leaders stands in front of Congress to give his last State of the Union speech (thank god!), remember the human cost of war. From The Herald, via Cynical-C.

72,000 American casualties: toll of war on terror

The US has suffered more than 72,000 battlefield casualties since the start of the war on terror in 2001, a Freedom of Information request has revealed.

The query by the campaigning Veterans for Common Sense organisation shows that 4372 American soldiers have died and another 67,671 have been wounded in action, injured in accidents or succumbed to illness in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The veterans' group had to force the US Defence Department to release the figures by persuading judges to uphold their FoI rights.

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A second request to the Veterans' Administration, the government-funded body responsible for taking care of ex-servicemen and women, showed 263,909 soldiers with experience of the two 21st-century wars have so far received treatment for everything from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to the aftermath of amputated limbs.

Unbearable

News regarding veterans keeps pouring in:

"He liked a cigarette, he liked a bottle of beer - he drank a bottle of beer like any man."

This from the BBC, in its report about Voytek, the "Soldier Bear" that fought with Polish troops during WWII.

Honour sought for 'Soldier Bear'

A campaign has been launched to build a permanent memorial to a bear which spent much of its life in Scotland - after fighting in World War II.

The bear - named Voytek - was adopted in the Middle East by Polish troops in 1943, becoming much more than a mascot.

The large animal even helped their armed forces to carry ammunition at the Battle of Monte Cassino.

Voytek - known as the Soldier Bear - later lived near Hutton in the Borders and ended his days at Edinburgh Zoo.

He was found wandering in the hills of Iran by Polish soldiers in 1943.

They adopted him and as he grew he was trained to carry heavy mortar rounds.

When Polish forces were deployed to Europe the only way to take the bear with them was to "enlist" him.

So he was given a name, rank and number and took part in the Italian campaign.

Scar Tissue

Ryan Vu sends along a link from Dennis Cooper's blog, The Weaklings, about facial prosthesis in WWI, a topic that Bitter Laughter broached early in its life. This post has a number of nice images, but I should warn you that they are a bit gory. To the right is an Otto Dix painting showing a facial injury.

The officers had a hard time explaining the concept of a machine gun or the power of an artillery shell to young soldiers who hadn't seen them. A soldier might stick his head out quickly to peek over the trench wall and get his nose shot off, or his chin or his cheek or his eyes and so on. This was a common occurrence on the front. Doctors had no idea how to deal with this swell of facial injuries.

These soldiers were called "The Men with Broken Faces" or "gueules cassées". There were so many of them during and after the war that in some combatant countries, a number of benches were painted blue indicating that the man sitting there would be distressing to look at. They endured total social isolation and alienation. Their faces were taken away from them and transformed on the battlefield to resemble the mud-churned pits of the trenches themselves. These men were the quintessential social pariahs of the day, not only for their specific disfigurement, but because their faces directly embodied the horrors of war and quite literally bore the inescapable reality of what we are capable of doing to each other. They often only found solace in each other and gave up any hope of leading a normal life. A unique brotherhood was formed where they pressed for their right to have underground social places of their own where they could be together without frightening the general public. Some of the veterans even took their families and started their own small communities far away from general society.

Part of what fascinates me about the facial prosthesis of the "Great" War is that it is in some ways the most extreme and spectacular form of prosthesis that proliferated after the war. I think it's hard to recover just how mended the streets of Europe looked in the mid 1920s--how many people would have donned crutches, fake arms, etc. But what's really striking about the facial prosthesis is that it is a cipher of the insane distance that science created between technologies of destruction and technologies of reconstruction. WWI inaugurated the century of technology and technological warfare, and the facial prosthesis that followed the war is a sign of just how gruesome this war was. And since we tend to think of World Wars through one of two images--mushroom clouds or gas chambers--the image of the reconstructed face is a reminder of all those figures that physically survived into the century, carrying the wounds of Continent on their bodies.

realism

Waiting For The Guards is the first of 3 films commissioned by Amnesty to highlight the enhanced interrogation techniques used by the CIA in the “War on Terror”.

The Directors approached the making of the film in a way that has never been done before, choosing to show the reality of Stress Positions in as authentic a way as possible. They filmed a person being put into Stress Positions over a 6 hour period. There is no acting on the part of the “prisoner” – his pain and anguish is for real.

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Depletion

Radioactive Ammunition Fired in Middle East May Claim More Lives Than Hiroshima and Nagasaki

By firing radioactive ammunition, the U.S., U.K., and Israel may have triggered a nuclear holocaust in the Middle East that, over time, will prove deadlier than the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan.

So much ammunition containing depleted uranium(DU) has been fired, asserts nuclear authority Leuren Moret, "The genetic future of the Iraqi people for the most part, is destroyed."

"More than ten times the amount of radiation released during atmospheric testing (of nuclear bombs) has been released from depleted uranium weaponry since 1991," Moret writes, including radioactive ammunition fired by Israeli troops in Palestine.

Link. Via Harper's Weekly Index.

Creative Thinking

Like a lot of people, I neglect the magazines I subscribe to. When I do read them, I am usually reminded why I subscribe.

And this month's Harper's has a truly great article that offers a novel way by which we the people can stop this war: a general strike.

Of all the various depredations of the Bush regime, none has been so thorough as its plundering of hope. Iraq will recover sooner. What was supposed to have been the crux of our foreign policy—a shock-and-awe tutorial on the utter futility of any opposition to the whims of American power—has achieved its greatest and perhaps its only lasting success in the American soul. You will want to cite the exceptions, the lunch-hour protests against the war, the dinner-party ejaculations of dissent, though you might also want to ask what substantive difference they bear to grousing about the weather or even to raging against the dying of the light—that is, to any ritualized complaint against forces universally acknowledged as unalterable. Bush is no longer the name of a president so much as the abbreviation of a proverb, something between Murphy’s Law and tomorrow’s fatal inducement to drink and be merry today.

If someone were to suggest, for example, that we begin a general strike on Election Day, November 6, 2007, for the sole purpose of removing this regime from power, how readily and with what well-practiced assurance would you find yourself producing the words “It won’t do any good”? Plausible and even courageous in the mouth of a patient who knows he’s going to die, the sentiment fits equally well in the heart of a citizen-ry that believes it is already dead.

What I really like about this article, too, is that Garret Keizer is finely attuned to the way in which we have become inured to this war such that "normal life" continues apace while Blackwater (and our army, too, let's not forget) shoots people down in the street.

Nobody reads old books anymore

For some reason, I didn't get hip to the NYTimes books blog, Paper Cuts, until recently. So you'll pardon me for posting a link with no commentary.

Back in 1943, American soldiers were given copies of a plainspoken book called “Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq During World War II.” Now the University of Chicago press has released a fascimile edition, and it’s both a beautiful object and a fascinating document, one whose lessons seem more valuable than ever.

I'd really like to see a copy of this, or at least take a look at the illustrations.